The one day last month when my entire navbar turned into a vertical slapstick comedy

I was updating a client site around 2 AM and accidentally left a closing brace out of a media query. Suddenly the whole navigation stacked vertically, each link was like 60px tall, and the logo floated off to the right completely alone. I stared at it for a good 10 minutes before I saw the missing bracket. Has anyone else had a CSS bug that looked intentional but was just pure chaos?

2 comments

2 Comments

miller.susan13h ago

My IE6 days from back in 2008. Had a client site where a missing semicolon in the CSS made the entire footer repeat itself 47 times down the page. Each copy was perfectly aligned and full width. Looked like some kind of brutalist art project. The client actually asked if I did it on purpose to make a statement about consumerism. Had to explain no, I just forgot a damn semicolon at 3 in the morning. Took me two hours to realize it because the repeating pattern was so clean.

miles_roberts2211h ago

Oh man, that's a perfect storm of a bug... makes me feel for you @miller.susan. Had something similar back in the day with a missing colon in a line of CSS that made a whole sidebar just... vanish into thin air. Worst part was how clean the error looked, like it was meant to be that way. You stare at it for an hour thinking maybe you're just not getting the artistic vision. Then you find the typo and feel like an absolute clown. That feeling when the client asks if it was intentional is the worst... like no, I'm just not very good at my job sometimes.